Skip to main content

Poem by Christopher Nield

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Christopher Nield (pictured) this Friday.

Nield lives in London, working as a copywriter specialising in charity marketing. He has worked with a range of organisations, including Médecins Sans Frontières, Friends of the Earth, The Camphill Family and Cancer Research UK.

His poetry features in New Poetries IV (Carcanet, 2007), a wide-ranging collection that anyone interested in good emergent poetry from the UK (and beyond) should seek out.

His poems also appear in magazines such as Magma, The London Magazine, PN Review, The Rialto, Nthposition, and Stand. In 2006 he was one of the winners of the Keats-Shelley prize. Nield will be appearing as a reader at the launch of the latest issue of Ambit, 7pm this coming 23 October, at The Owl Bookshop, 209 Kentish Town Road, London NW5.


Prayer Wheel

A circle forms a lotus in the brain,
Omniscient and happy as the sun.
We turn the wheel and watch the world remain

An exiled god, whose broken words explain
Beyond the revolutionary gun,
A circle forms a lotus in the brain

To doubt that titan’s rational disdain
And liberate the many from the one.
We turn the wheel and watch the world remain

A monkey full of wanderlust and pain.
May love describe a heart where there is none.
A circle forms a lotus in the brain,

A hunger to be lit in every vein –
To sit and face the ghost we cannot shun.
We turn the wheel and watch the world remain

A devil’s meditation and refrain:
The mind goes out the moment breath is done.
A circle forms a lotus in the brain;
We turn the wheel and watch the world remain.

poem by Christopher Nield; it originally appeared in The London Magazine; reprinted with permission of the author

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Absolutely beautiful. I found this poet on the Epoch Times website.

I was never really a fan of poetry, but reading Chris's The Antidote: Classic Poetry for Modern Life... it's really opened my eyes.

Very moving writer, very moving.
Thu Oct 28, 05:31:00 am 2010
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more